City Place Santa Clara

Two Silicon Valley cities are embroiled in a turf war over a mega development project — and now it’s turned into a feud between two of the Bay Area’s most powerful mayors.

Two months after Santa Clara Mayor Lisa Gillmor got the job, she met with San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo inside a City Hall conference room. What started as a “nice meeting” eventually led to a touchy subject: City Place Santa Clara, a 9 million-square-foot project with space for office, retail, a hotel and 1,300 residential units.

The project will create 25,000 jobs — but Santa Clara can house only 13 percent of the workers. The rest will need to live elsewhere. And Liccardo worries it’ll be San Jose — deepening the city’s anemic jobs-to-housing imbalance and worsening traffic congestion.

But during the “nice” meeting on April 1, Gillmor says Liccardo failed to mention that San Jose hired the influential Sohagi Law Groupto fight the development. And that in a few weeks, she’d receive a 44-page letter attacking the project. Gillmor was stunned.